The Role of Cognates in Word Acquisition
PhD Defence / Departament de Medicina i Ciències de la Vida
2024-11-03
Average English-native 20-year-old knows ~42,000 words: mental lexicon
Lexical representation: (at least) form-meaning association
Inter-modal paradigms
(Bergelson and Swingley 2012, 2015; Tincoff and Jusczyk 1999, 2012)
Parental reports
e.g., MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al. 1994)
Vocabulary size grows non-linearly during the second year of life
Figure 1: Vocabulary size norms for 51,800 monolingual children learning 35 distinct languages (wordbank)
Cascaded activation: activation spreads across non-selected lexical representations (Allopenna, Magnuson, and Tanenhaus 1998)
In children (Chow, Davies, and Plunkett 2017)
Challenges a bilingual environment
Bilingual words acquisition
Cognateness
Language non-selectivity
Increased complexity in linguistic context:
Two grammatical systems, two phoneme inventories, two sets of word-forms
Reduced linguistic input
Split into two languages
Increased referential ambiguity
2 labels, 1 referent
Bilinguals acquire words at similar rates as monolinguals (Hoff et al. 2012)
Lexically closer languages ➡️ Larger vocabulary size (Floccia et al. 2018)
English-Dutch > English-Mandarin
Cognate: form-similar translation equivalents (TEs)
| Cognate | Non-cognate |
|---|---|
| [cat] /ˈgat-ˈgato/ | [dog] /ˈgos-ˈpe.ro/ |
Cognates acquired earlier than non-cognates (Mitchell, Tsui, and Byers-Heinlein 2023; Bosch and Ramon-Casas 2014)
Figure 2: Pairwise lexical similarity
What mechanisms support a cognate facilitation during word acquisition?
Language non-selective lexical access
Activation spreads across non-selected representations in both languages, through phonological and conceptual links. (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, and Sebastian-Galles 2000)
Cognate beginnings to lexical acquisition
Bilinguals keep up with monolinguals in vocabulary growth
The presence of cognates seems to facilitate vocabulary acquisition
Language co-activation has been suggested to underlie this phenomenon
What mechanisms are support the role of co-activation in cognate acquisition?
Accumulator Model of Bilingual Lexical Acquisition
Information is provided in the form of word effective learning instances (ELI).
\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \end{aligned} \\ \]
\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Exposure}_{ij}} \\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \\ \end{aligned} \]
Learning instances for one word-form may result in the accumulation of information for its translation equivalent
Degree of income additional information proportional to the phonological similarity between both translation equivalents
\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Exposure}_{ij}} \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Cognateness}_{j}}\\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Frequency}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \\ \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Cognateness}_{j}} = &\color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Levenshtein}(j, j')} \end{aligned} \\ \]
Figure 4: Posterior distribution of fixed regression coefficients
Figure 5: Posterior marginal effects
Developmental trajectories of bilingual spoken word recognition
Thanks